Suppes stayed with us. All the other Blaisdell books
went with him to Ginn, but Suppes we wouldn't part with at any
price.

Q:

And you kept Singer?

Cerf:

Singer is still part of Random House. We've got a new
management in there now. We've moved it to New York where it
should have been all of the time. We've revised the whole setup.
We've got a man named Francis Egan heading Singer now.
He has been there about six months. He's just turning the
whole thing upside down. It takes time, but we're convinced
Singer is going to be an important part of our business.

That is the one acquisition that we made that you might
say, “What the hell did they do that for?" Well, we wanted to
be in the textbook business; and, instead of starting a business,
which takes four or five years, we thought that we'd get one
that was actually going and doing well. On the surface it was.
As I say, for the first two years that we had it, those profits
continued; but we didn't realize the dry rot that was creeping in.